


Shadow Tag

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-10
Updated: 2009-06-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:12:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's summer again, and there's a shade clinging to the underside of Nico's collar, its voice like smoke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadow Tag

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the Last Olympian. You can read here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/85904.html).

In the forest, a small girl collects kindling. There is soot in her smock and in her hair, and her eyes are embers. She stretches up onto her tiptoes to shake a broken branch loose of the others, humming something that could either have been "Greensleeves" or Miley Cyrus.

Further up in the tree, where the shadows are as thick as veins against the trunk, a young man in a bomber jacket leans out, as sudden as smoke. "May I join you, Lady Hestia?"

The girl looks up, and smiles. "Your company would be most welcome, Nico di Angelo."

Nico slithers from the tree, landing lightly beside her. The shadows cling and fold around him like creases in a newspaper, and Hestia smiles and nods a greeting to the shade that peeks at her from underneath Nico's collar.

He doesn't notice, asks her instead how the hearth is doing.

 

Nico never learned to appreciate being turned into a geranium, so like any good teenage boy, he puts more effort into avoiding Persephone than he ever does into doing anything useful around the place. She has half a mind to lecture him, because he's only half-god, for Zeus's sake, but she'd rather avoid the confrontation if at all possible.

She supposes this is her lot as a goddess. They all have their own ways of dealing with it; Amphritrite's lips go thin and blue like she wants to choke somebody, but Earth is 75% seawater and she has plenty to preoccupy her time, and Hera organizes those idiotic family picnics in some vain attempt to remind her husband that his place is with his wife, and not sniffing after some mortal's skirt. Neither of them have ever turned a half-blood into a geranium, as far as Persephone knows, which is kind of a shame. Geraniums always look especially nice in hanging baskets.

Regardless, it takes her an embarrassingly long time to notice what's going on. Nico's been living with them since the first snowfall, and it isn't until mid-January that Persephone catches sight of her, trying to make herself as small as possible against the nape of Nico's neck.

"What --" she says, abortively, as Hades places a hand in the small of her back. Nico bows to them and keeps walking. The shade disappears from view underneath his hair.

She shoots a vicious look at her husband.

He sighs. "I know, I know."

"And you're not doing anything about it? You can't play favorites, Hades. She's breaking the rules."

He has the decency to look a little uncomfortable. "I'll take it up with Thanatos," he promises her, a little vaguely, and she scowls at him. He may be god of the Underworld, but Thanatos was the actual god of death, a distinction Hades only made when he was trying to get away with something.

Persephone wonders how Amphritrite or Hera would handle this, and then thinks longingly of lilacs.

 

 

"That's odd," murmurs Nico, turning his back to the setting sun. She lies on the pavement in front of him, stretched as thin as his shadow, arms tucked behind her head like she was trying for a tan. "I was always the one following you. Now you're the one following me."

She replies with a voice as thin and rustling as stray papers and dead leaves, but they are both children of Hades and he has no trouble understanding the dead when she speaks to him.

 

 

"How come that kid has two shadows?" asks the newest half-blood, who can't be more than nine years old and just came in that day, heralded by a rattled satyr and a swarm of locusts. 

Percy has his money down that Demeter will claim her before June is up. Thalia, who's visiting briefly on the Hunt's way up the coast to Maine, clucks her tongue at him and mentions something about how the girl's got Dionysus's chin. He hopes she's wrong: it's an unfortunate thing to have.

Isabel Hopp, head of the Hermes cabin, shrugs in response to the question. "It gets thicker every day."

"It looks like a girl." She grows nervous, abruptly, glancing over her shoulder like she's not sure she's supposed to be talking about it. She catches Percy's eye and looks away quickly, pretending to be very interested in what Isabel is saying about the amphitheater.

"She's right, you know," he says to Annabeth, frowning. "It looks more like Bianca now. I thought he'd let her go."

"Your head is full of kelp," Annabeth says over the top of the shield she's scouring. "Whoever said it was Nico who was having trouble letting go?"

 

 

The campers take to calling her Nico's girlfriend. There are only a handful of people who remember Bianca, and even fewer who've been told the story, since it's simply not their story to tell, but if it bothers Nico, he doesn't let on. So the Aphrodite cabin giggles and gossips about the corpse that fell in love with the necromancer and Percy and Annabeth look faintly ill. Long after lights out, there is the sound of one boy talking in the Hades cabin, and the faint noises that Bianca makes in reply. It sounds more and more like words.

 

 

To her due credit, Alecto doesn't even flinch when Hades comes bearing down on her, huffing like an overweight bull. In fact, she pauses to appreciate the irony that he's as enraged as he is, considering he's the one who let it happen by not doing anything to stop it. 

Inaction's the exact same as action, don't let anybody ever tell you otherwise.

"It's not something that can just be reversed!" he bellows at her, and small stones fall from the ceiling as it quakes. Behind her, her sisters bristle and hiss. "The string of her life was cut! She's dead! so tell me why I just felt her disappear completely from the Underworld!"

"Have you ever tried this stuff, Lord?" she cuts in conversationally. She holds up a thin tube of superglue. "Mortals always come up with the most ingenious little devices, don't they? This stuff is second only to duct tape. It works great for putting stuff back together. Strings, for instance."

He blinks at her, momentarily dumbfounded enough to shrink down to mortal size. "But. Why?" he asks, again, and Alecto almost smiles to herself, because she's known him for enough millennia to recognize the gratitude in his voice, underneath the currents of anger.

She remembers the look on his face when he summoned her in the wreckage of that hotel, the harshness in her own voice when she reminded him that he couldn't save Maria di Angelo. It was something close to hatred, something close to helplessness, and as a monster, it chilled her to the core. Gods weren't supposed to be helpless. She remembers the children, too. Everything about them had been so small then, so breakable, their faces pale little mirrors of their mother's.

_You're the only thing I really remember before the Lotus Hotel, and the only person we ever really listened to besides ourselves,_ Nico had told her once, shrugging like it didn't matter. She doesn't pretend to understand mortals, but she knows when something doesn't add up right, and being the closest thing Nico and Bianca di Angelo ever had to a parent was one of those things.

"It wasn't her time," was all she said, and somewhere, Bianca di Angelo put a hand to her chest and felt a heartbeat.

 

 

They lay together on the grass underneath the constellations. Nico points out Zoe Nightshade, racing across the heavens with her bow drawn, and the tightness around Bianca's eyes betrays her sadness. She hadn't felt Zoe's death in the Underworld since Zoe was a Titan, but she makes a beautiful figure among the stars.

"Are you going to join the Hunt again?" he asks her, tilting his head to get a good look at her profile. Try as he might, his voice comes out a little reproachful. 

She looks at him, reaching out with a pale hand to push his dark hair out of his face. "You need a haircut," she answers, her voice soft and chiding. "And where on earth did you get that jacket?"

"Do you like it?"

She considers him, and for a moment she can see the ten-year-old boy beaming at her over a deck of Mythomagic cards inside the thin teenager with the sunken, shadowy eyes and the death-head ring. It's almost ironic, she thinks, that she had more effect on him growing up when she was dead than she ever had while she was alive. Everything Nico'd done, he'd done for her, Bianca, his older sister, the most important person in his life. Nico is the most loyal person she knows, and if she gives up Artemis to keep him, she thinks she'll be okay with that. Nico could teach the goddess something about loyalty.

"Yeah," she says, and rolls over in the grass in order to rest her head on his shoulder. She can feel the faint warmth of him underneath the down of the jacket, feels his hand slip up to hold her around the ribs, pressing against her pulse, thumping steadily. "Yeah, I like it."

 

 

Everyone wants the twins from the Hades cabin on their team for capture the flag. Nico and Bianca have barely had to do a chore for themselves since the other campers discovered their ability to teleport into shadow.

They play shadow tag between the trees, skipping right on by the anxious-looking border guards; two unlucky kids from the Apollo cabin in hand-me-down armor that didn't fit quite right.

"Bianca?" Nico calls softly into the gloom, hanging upside down from a thick tree branch, hoping the cover of the leaves will hide him from any patrols.

"Here," she whispers into his ear.

Below, a little soot-covered girl in a brown dress looks up from her pile of kindling in time to see brother and sister drop together, disappearing into darkness.

 

-  
fin


End file.
